SeaTwirl Spent EIC Accelerator Money on a Floating Wind Turbine

Most floating wind turbines are conventional three-bladed machines bolted onto a floating base. SeaTwirl, a Gothenburg company listed on Nasdaq First North since 2016, builds something else: a turbine that spins around a vertical axis, with the rotor, tower and a long underwater buoy turning together as one piece. In April 2019 the European Commission's list of winners of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, named SeaTwirl AB, with no partner company, for a grant-only project. According to CORDIS, the EU contributed €2,482,025 to a €3,545,750 project whose first step was "S2, a 1-MW turbine". Seven years later, S2 has not been installed anywhere.

The company is still working on the idea, and with more EU money than before. In 2025 a consortium led technically by SeaTwirl won €15 million from Horizon Europe to build and run a 2 MW version, and in September 2026 the Swedish Energy Agency let SeaTwirl move the unspent part of a grant for its 1 MW turbine, just over SEK 38 million, to that new project, according to the company's announcement, also published by Inderes.

Where SeaTwirl Stands Now

SeaTwirl is active and still pre-revenue. Its 2025 annual report shows net sales of SEK 43,424, a loss after financial items of SEK 30.7 million and 14 employees. Its interim report for the second quarter of 2026, published by Inderes and summarised by Quartr, recorded no sales, an operating loss of SEK 5.07 million for the quarter and cash of SEK 72.2 million on 30 June 2026.

Its whole programme now runs through VERTI-GO, a Horizon Europe project to design, build, install and operate a 2 MW floating turbine. According to CORDIS, the project runs from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2029, costs €20,902,620.25, receives €14,988,373.30 from the EU and pays SeaTwirl €7,490,954.99 of it. offshoreWIND.biz lists ten partners, including University College Cork as coordinator, EDP's research centre, Bureau Veritas and Zorlu Enerji. The design phase is due to end around the end of 2026. The demonstration site has not been published, and SeaTwirl's September 2026 announcement says more money will be needed for the build phase.

Commercial deals so far are agreements to explore, not orders. In December 2025 SeaTwirl signed a SEK 0.8 million feasibility study with an unnamed global industrial supplier on powering fish farms in Chile, which produced the SEK 766,836 of sales in the first quarter of 2026, according to its Q1 2026 report. On 22 September 2026 it signed a five-year memorandum of understanding with Hunter Floating Offshore Wind for a proposed 20 MW demonstration project off Newcastle in New South Wales, which sets no amounts and binds neither party to build, according to RenewEconomy and Windtech International. Memoranda and cooperation agreements with Kontiki Winds, Verlume, Serica Energy, Sumitomo Corporation Power & Mobility, Aks Wind and Mooreast are listed in the company's press releases; none has been followed by an announced turbine order.

The Technology: A Turbine That Spins With Its Float

In a SeaTwirl turbine the blades, the tower and a straight steel spar buoy that hangs deep below the surface rotate as one unit. The generator sits in a housing just above the waterline, wrapped around the rotating shaft and moored to the seabed. Because the heavy parts sit low, the company says the floating structure needs less steel, and because the generator is at sea level, repairs can be made from small local vessels instead of the large crane ships needed to reach a nacelle 100 metres up, as its annual report and the CORDIS final report describe it. A vertical-axis rotor also works whatever the wind direction, so it needs no yaw system.

The claims of lower cost are the company's own. The 2019 proposal promised 14% lower capital costs, 22% lower operating costs and a 20% lower cost of energy than rival floating designs, figures CORDIS reproduces from the application. They have not been tested at full scale, since the only SeaTwirl turbine ever put to sea is S1, a 30 kW prototype installed off Lysekil on the Swedish west coast in 2015, as both the annual report and offshoreWIND.biz record. S1 was dismantled in November 2025 and its book value of SEK 10.26 million written off, according to the 2025 year-end report.

In May 2025 the company changed the concept: it launched a two-bladed rotor, which turns the turbine into a flat structure that can be assembled lying on the ground and launched without large cranes or deep-water ports. Chief executive Johan Sandberg called it a "flat-pack assembly" that smaller yards can handle. The 1 MW S2x had three blades; the 2 MW VERTI-GO machine has two.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The EU project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 May 2022. Its objective on CORDIS was to "develop S2, a 1-MW turbine which will pave the way for larger ones: 7MW (2025), 10MW (2028)". By 2025 SeaTwirl expected to have sold 118 MW of capacity, to reach "over €105M revenues" and €19.5 million of EBITDA, and to create more than 50 direct jobs.

The final periodic report, covering September 2020 to May 2022, describes "technological optimisation of the turbine design" with subcontractors, work on patents and market strategy, and new share issues. It does not report a turbine built or installed. In February 2020, five months into the project, SeaTwirl said the EU money had let it resolve the critical design questions and set S2's installation for the second or third quarter of 2021, in a press release in which it also walked away from a SEK 70 million investment offer from Colruyt Group and NorSea Group that had been agreed in principle in 2019, as offshoreWIND.biz reported at the time. The board's reason was that the share price had risen to SEK 210 to 220 from the SEK 65 in the offer.

The date then slipped. In September 2021 SeaTwirl postponed the installation again, citing the pending Norwegian concession, and shifted its focus to turbines for floating wind farms, in a release carried by Börskollen. The concession for a site in Boknafjorden, about 700 metres off the coast in up to 130 metres of water, came in March 2022 and became final in January 2023 after an appeal was rejected, according to offshoreWIND.biz. Westcon Yards was chosen to build and install the renamed S2x in September 2022, and the Swedish Energy Agency granted SEK 50.4 million for it that November, payable until February 2026. In September 2026 SeaTwirl said it had chosen to prioritise the 2 MW two-bladed turbine over the S2x and moved the unspent grant across. No installation of S2 or S2x has been announced by the company or any third party.

1. Optimise the turbine designDeliveredDesign work, tank tests reported in January 2022 and patents, per the CORDIS report and company releases.
2. Site and permits for S2DeliveredNorwegian concession granted March 2022, final January 2023.
3. Build and install the 1 MW S2Not achievedPlanned for 2021; never installed; dropped for the 2 MW design in 2026.
4. 7 MW turbine by 2025Not achievedThe largest turbine now in development is 2 MW, due by 2029.
5. 118 MW sold and €105M revenue by 2025Not achieved2025 net sales were SEK 43,424.
6. More than 50 new direct jobsNot achieved14 employees in 2025, 15 in 2021.

The design work and the permits are real results. But the grant was awarded to put a 1 MW machine in the water, and the project closed without one.

The Money

SeaTwirl has paid for its work with grants and with repeated share issues on First North. Its releases list a rights issue of about SEK 46.9 million in November 2021, warrant exercises of about SEK 15.3 million each in June 2022 and June 2023, and a rights issue of about SEK 64.5 million that closed in January 2023. No new share issue has been announced since. The annual report puts accumulated losses carried forward at SEK 172 million at the end of 2025, before that year's loss, and shows 5,983,459 shares outstanding.

The cash jumped in 2025 because the EU paid SeaTwirl €5,618,216 up front, about 75% of its VERTI-GO allocation, according to the year-end report. Total assets rose to SEK 175.9 million while the equity ratio fell from 90.9% to 56.7%. Equity itself fell from SEK 130.3 million to SEK 99.7 million over 2025 and to SEK 90.5 million by June 2026.

The team has barely changed size. The five-year overview gives 15 employees for 2021 and 14 for 2025; the same report's staff note gives 15 rather than 13 for 2024. In the Q1 2026 report Sandberg said the organisation had doubled since the turn of the year to deliver VERTI-GO. A headcount for 2026 has not been published.

Why Europe Should Care

Bottom-fixed foundations stop at about 50 to 60 metres of water, according to both the CORDIS report and SeaTwirl's annual report; beyond that, turbines have to float. The Commission's 2020 offshore renewable energy strategy set a target of at least 60 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050, as McCann FitzGerald also summarised. Horizon Europe followed with a call for demonstrations of innovative floating wind concepts, which funded VERTI-GO as one of two winning projects, according to SeaTwirl's annual report. The same report puts the capital cost of floating wind 30% to 50% above bottom-fixed wind and points to limited capacity for platforms, moorings and installation vessels.

A turbine that can be assembled flat in a small yard and serviced from a small boat would ease that bottleneck, and it would be European technology. The case for SeaTwirl rests on that promise. The record, so far, is one 30 kW prototype that spent a decade at sea and a full-scale machine that is still on paper.

The Verdict

SeaTwirl has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.